HISTORICAL KANSAS
HISTORICAL KANSAS When Kansas territory was opened for white settlement on May 30, 1854, a bitter contest developed over the slavery question. Established the following December, Topeka, 25 miles ahead, favored the Free-State cause even though the territorial government was at first Proslavery. Rebelling Free Staters attempted to set up a rival legislature in Topeka in 1856. Acting for President Franklin Pierce came Col. E. V. Sumner with five companies of U.S. dragoons and two cannons specially loaded for legislators. Lawmajkers understood the message and adjourned reluctantly, but Topeka got even. When the city named its first streets for early Presidents, Pierce was omitted.
Free Staters eventually won out and Kansas became a state January 29, 1861, with Topeka as the capital. The Statehouse, started in 1866, was completed in 1903. Topeka is known throughout the world from the contribution of its Menninger Foundation to mental health. South of the city the Topeka Army Air Field (later Forbes Air Force Base) was a processing center in World War II for B-17, B-24 and B-29 aircraft and crews. From a few miles west of Topeka to Lawrence, I-70 generally follows a main route of the Oregon-California trail, traveled from the late 1830's to 1860 by thousands of emigrants, in hundreds of wagon trains.
I-70, Wabaunsee County
Milepost 337, eastbound rest area near Paxico
39.05912,-96.12059 97. BEECHER BIBLES
/resource/markers/images/small/kshm097_wbpaxicobeecherbibles11062012kdot.jpg In 1856 free-state colonists from Connecticut joined with earlier settlers to found the town of Wabaunsee, 15 miles northwest of here. Brooklyn abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher helped raise funds to supply the settlers with the new Sharps repeating rifle for their defense during the sometimes-violent era of “Bleeding Kansas.” According to an 1856 New York Tribune article, Beecher “believed that the Sharps rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.” Beecher's congregation also supplied the colonists with Bibles, perhaps leading to the widespread use of the term “Beecher Bibles” to describe the rifles. Wabaunsee residents soon became involved in the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people to freedom in Canada. Between 1860 and 1862 the community completed the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The nearby Mount Mitchell Heritage Prairie today interprets the history of this community.
Note: This marker replaced old historical marker 97 'Historical Kansas' in 2012.
I-70, Wabaunsee County
Milepost 337, westbound rest area near Paxico
Plaque via Kansas Historical Society, and is used with their permission. Full page